Growth Hacking Your Way Ahead with Competitive Research

As a growth hacker working on someone else's businesses, you often lack the same level of clarity the founder or business owner has about the company.

Of course, you can directly talk to the leadership team to get their input, but often it does not cover everything they think and envision - not even most of it.

Sometimes, as a budding entrepreneur, you, too, might lack clarity on where your business stands and where it has to go. So, what do you do then?

The hands-down best way to understand a business inside-out very quickly is to understand the competitors better than they understand themselves!

In this article, we explore some great hacks and tools to piggyback your competition and get ahead of them before anyone even realizes what just happened.

Who is Your Real Competition?

Most marketers and business owners think that competitors are only those who are doing exactly what you are doing (offering the same services or selling the same products).

Growth hacking takes you a step further.

Your competitors can be put in one of two buckets:

1. Businesses that have the same value proposition as yours
2. Businesses that are targeting the same audiences as yours

When you are able to clearly define your competitors, you can analyze them at a microscopic level to find out what they are doing, what has worked for them, and where they are going wrong. By doing that, you can give your business a head start that nobody else was able to!

So, how do you find your competition?

Finding Your Competition

Just Google

Google is the world's largest search engine. Think of it like an encyclopedia that has all your competitors listed in a single place. If you are able to effectively sort through this, you can easily discover who is beating you in the market and how to outshine them.

You can start by simply typing in your service/product and noting down all the competitors you come across.

Depending on the niche and nature of businesses, you may find it slightly difficult to find highly relevant competition. In such cases, you can try broadening your horizon by looking for a similar business in a different country.

Use Tools

One step ahead of Googling is to use tools that give you a more structured and bird's eye view of all the data publicly available on your competitors.

Owler is a business intelligence platform that provides information on companies, including their financials, news, and competitors. You can use Owler to search for specific businesses and get an overview of their operations, including their revenue, number of employees, and funding history. Additionally, Owler allows you to compare a company's performance to its competitors, giving you a better understanding of the market and where a business stands.

SimilarWeb, on the other hand, is a website analytics tool that provides insights into a website's traffic, audience, and online presence. With SimilarWeb, you can track a website's traffic sources, including organic search, direct, and referral traffic, as well as see which websites are sending traffic to a competitor's site.

Stalk Competitor Ads

One of the best ways to understand how your competition is positioning itself in the market is to stalk its online ads.

But how do you find all the ads of all your competitors? They are likely running ads on multiple social media platforms (some that you've never even heard of). Is there a hack to get all of them?

The answer is a resounding YES!

Here are three tools that help you do this:

1. Facebook Ad Library
2. Adbeat
3. PowerAdSpy

Facebook Ad Library

This is a free tool provided by Facebook that allows you to browse ads from all over the world. You can filter the ads based on keywords, location, and the type of products or services being advertised.

Adbeat

Adbeat crawls different websites to fetch raw data and turn it into human-readable visuals for better insights. You can filter the results by keywords, location, and product type so you can easily find the most relevant ads for your industry.

PowerAdSpy

PowerAdSpy is a powerful competitive analysis tool that uses AI and helps you uncover the best strategies your competitors are using and find out which ads are converting. It also allows you to see what kind of creatives your competitors are using, so you can get inspiration for your own campaigns.

Keep a Tab on Competitor Mentions

As a business, you must constantly monitor what is being said about you and your competitors.

This means keeping an eye out for any mentions of your competitors on social media, forums, and websites. This gives you an understanding of their positioning in the market as well as helps identify potential opportunities that they may be missing out on.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is a good tool that allows you to set up alerts for any keywords related to your business or industry. This way, you will get notified when a competitor is mentioned in any news article or blog post.

Brandwatch

You can also use social media monitoring tools such as Brandwatch, which allow you to track conversations around certain topics and keywords. This helps you stay up to date on what people are saying about your competitors, allowing you to formulate more effective strategies for staying ahead of the competition.

Monitor Competitor Landing Page

Landing pages are a focused and effective platform to convert website visitors into customers. They are the deciding factor of whether or not a marketing campaign is successful. Hence, most businesses curate their landing pages in an extremely meticulous manner, from design to copy.

Monitoring competitor landing pages can provide businesses with valuable insights into their competition and help them stay ahead. For example, by analyzing competitor landing pages, businesses can gain a better understanding of what types of messaging and design elements are effective in their industry. They can also identify areas for improvement and identify new opportunities for differentiation.

When monitoring your competitors, here are some things to take note of:

1. Take note of any unique or effective elements used and consider incorporating similar elements into your own landing pages.
2. Look for opportunities to differentiate your landing pages and offer a unique value proposition to their target audience.
3. Continuously test and optimize your landing pages to ensure they are delivering the best possible user experience and converting at the highest possible rate.

So, how can you make sure you don't miss a single change (no matter how small) that your competitor makes on their website or landing page?

Using a tool, of course!

Versionista

Versionista is a great tool that allows you to monitor and track any changes made on your competitor's website or landing page. The tool has a free plan if you want to start exploring right away.

Create a Competitor Report

This is the final step in the process of competitor analysis. Creating a comprehensive report will help you to summarize your findings, track any changes and gain valuable insights into the competition, all from a single dashboard that you have curated.

Use the template below to make your own competitor report and start hacking your growth!

Conclusion

Competitor analysis is an important part of any business's marketing and growth strategy. By gaining insights into how your competitors are positioning themselves in the market, you can identify potential opportunities that they may be missing out on.

Always look for smart ways and effective tools to keep an eye on your competitors. This will help you stay on top of their strategies and keep up with the changing market trends. Ultimately, this will give you a competitive advantage over your competitors and maximize your chances for success.

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